John Mayall's Blues-breakers. Concentrating once more on a blues repertoire, Clapton has come back to the full dense sound of the Gibson guitar, which dominates the instrumental thrust of the band. He has recovered the crisp, fluid sense of phrasing that catapulted him into the vanguard, while maintaining the mature vocal style that has characterized his latest studio efforts.
This is not a traditional live album; it starts at no particular point and ends with a hard-charging version of Bobby Bland's "Farther On up the Road" that doesn't necessarily mark the close of any particular concert, although it does provide an emotional resolution. The essential concern is to provide a comfortable balance between acoustic and electric songs, with the primary emphasis on the kind of "traditional" blues songs which have always provided Clapton with his most effective base for improvisational fireworks.
Appropriately enough, the album starts with a delicately etched blues phrase from Clapton's guitar—the rush of notes that leads into the first verse of "Have You Ever Loved a Woman." In the past, this song has always been one of Clapton's most searing and painful vehicles. This time, he treats it with a good deal more objectivity and distance. In fact, he even chooses to make light of one of the song's key lines: "... And all the time you know, she belongs to your very best friend" by interjecting, "Did I mention any names?"
The numerous guitar breaks are delivered with thoroughly professional smoothness, and although they lack the naked intensity of the version on Clapton's live set with Derek and the Dominos, they make up for it in terms of pacing and fluency. George Terry, Clapton's extremely capable coguitarist, trades off with the master toward the end, creating succinct statements on a Fender Stratocaster.
"Presence of the Lord" begins acoustically, with Clapton and Yvonne Elliman, who has added an extra vocal dimension on recent Clapton albums, singing in tandem with customary soulfulness; then it jumps into the uptempo segment. The marked contrast between the parts of the song is powerfully highlighted but without the total effectiveness of the classically paced wah-wah segue on Blind Faith's original.
But it is with the surging double-barreled finale, Robert Johnson's "Rambling on My Mind"—which introduced Clapton's vocalizing on the classic Bluesbreakers album—and "Farther On up the Road," that Clapton's guitar takes over completely. On "Rambling," his playing is marked by all of the speed, flash and fire of old. In this case, however, all of Clapton'
